You have to hand it to Students For Liberty. Every day I look around and grow despondent, seeing the tyranny that is promoted endlessly, the ever increasing burden of regulations and dominion, the corruption, the wars, and most importantly the bald-faced stupidity of the public, and I think we’re doomed as a country. But then I take a wild gander at SFL’s website, and realize that there are thousands of young people—both in the United States and around the globe—who have recognized the real problems that are facing us as a society and are working towards fixing them.

Not only, then, are we growing as a movement, but we’re also growing in the youth area, meaning we’ll have long-term and sustainable growth. Perhaps their greatest product has been their book series, edited by Tom G. Palmer, beginning with the knockout The Economics of Freedom and continuing withThe Morality of Capitalism. Now, SFL and Palmer are tackling a subject that I think libertarians have really failed to address adequately so far, in the latest book,After The Welfare State.

It’s not ready yet, but I really look forward to reading it. The first two books were substantive and informative, though simple and relatively lightweight (though considering this movement, I’m pretty much comparing it to Hayek, Friedman, and Mises, so there is a low bar there.) But the reason I really want to peruse this volume is because welfarism is one of our most pernicious foes.

The ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit this week in federal court on behalf of fifteen residents of an apartment complex in Nashville, TN who say they were targets of an unlawful immigration raid. The defendants allege that ICE agents and Metro Nashville police officers forced their way into their homes without warrants. When residents asked the officers to show a warrant, one agent reportedly said, “We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE.” Then, gesturing to his genitals, the officer reportedly said “the warrant is coming out of my balls.”

I’m sure he meant it was going to be generated in his balls and then be distributed via his deployment tube; if it actually was coming out of his balls, he should get them checked. I don’t think they’re supposed to have holes in them. I mean, they’re not Wiffle balls, are they?

Snark aside, this is yet another dangerous abuse of government power. It is nothing new, and that’s the part I find most shocking. In the most powerful country on Earth*, one that has in the past championed civil liberties the most, where we have a Constitutional amendment protecting privacy in one’s home and prohibiting officials from invading said privacy, we have “law” enforcement going around completely disrespecting said law in order to pursue, at best, questionable policy outcomes set in place by politicians with, at best, questionable comprehension of the situation and the consequences. And we’re not outraged by this? What a docile population we’ve become.

We often hearing about how successful people want to give back to society in some way, usually by giving up the wealth they earn. It’s something that they tend to preach constantly, though mostly through charity; but also through higher taxes.

The Atlas Network has put out a great video on the morality of profit, nothing that those “giving back” have nothing to give back at all. The money they made was because they got rich through voluntary exchanges of commerce with consumers that wanted to by the products they were selling:

On last week’s Freedom Watch, Andrew Napolitano had Lou Dobbs, the uber-protectionist talk show host, and Tom Palmer from the Cato Institute on to discuss the issue of free trade.

Dobbs claims to be supportive of free trade, but launches into a populist diatribe where he talks about unemployment, ostensibly saying trade policies will cause people to lose more jobs.

He was saying this when unemployment was relatively low as well. It’s the same old song and dance. He never offers a reasoned perspective, just emotionally charged rhetoric and Palmer destroys him on it.